Awadh, India, 1875:

The camp nestled in a large clearing in the jungle, its tents and flags and pennants dwarfed by the overhanging trees. They were mostly sal and shisham trees, but any available space that wasn't sal or shisham was made almost solid by vines, bushes and buzzing insects, as though the clearing was trying to weave itself shut around the little camp. Here and there among the leaves peeped an orchid, or the blossoms of the bright-flowering coral tree. They looked like the tail feathers of exotic birds that had nestled in amongst the branches.

Sanjeev, who had grown up in the forests around Lucknow, was surprised by how well the landscape had taken to this little camp. Technically, it was an Indian affair. The soldiers were all that was left of the great rebellion of 1857. The General was Azimullah Khan, who had advised the great Nana Sahib in his campaign against the British, and who had survived malarial fever in the terai to rally these troops into a band of wandering outlaws.

But the camp had been permeated by Europeans who, for one reason or another, didn't get on with the British Raj. And chief among them was the man who seemed to do all the day-to-day running of the place, General Jack Cade.

Sanjeev watched him now, as he rode into the camp.

"You're lucky to have caught him," said Sanjeev's companion, a muscular but gentle European, known in the camp and its environs only as Brandt. "He's been away for three weeks. We weren't expecting him back until tomorrow."

Sanjeev, who had been waiting in the camp for two hours, trying not to make eye-contact with any of the soldiers, didn't feel lucky. He was a well-respected craftsman with a family, and the fewer mercenaries he knew by name, the better.

He realized that Brandt was still talking, and made an effort to attend, although Brandt's face was so honest and open—so like the faces of those chubby boys with angel wings that Western artists seemed to favour so much—that you seldom had to rely on his actual words to know what he was saying. At the moment, his brow was wrinkled, and a hint of sullenness had crept into his voice.

"—do better to wait until after he's seen the Sahiba, to be honest. He's been away for three weeks. He'll be in an awful mood until he's seen the Sahiba."

"I've never seen him in a bad mood before," said Sanjeev. He was used to thinking of the General as a bright-eyed, lavish, and excitable man, who came into Sanjeev's workshop, praised the merchandize to the skies, and asked endless questions—not just about rifles, barrels, and cartridges, but about Sanjeev's family, about Lucknow, about Shiva and the cosmic order. He was not exactly respectful, but not disdainful either—the exact opposite of the British Sahibs, in fact, who somehow managed to be both.

"Oh, he'll still smile, and enquire after your family," said Brandt. "You know the General. He wants everybody to get along—and, most of all, he wants everybody to get along with him. But, if you waited until after he'd seen the Sahiba, you'd get unreasonable courtesy, and quite an unreasonable price."

Sanjeev heaved a bitter sigh. He had five daughters of marriageable age and getting them all husbands was proving to be an expensive and arduous task. Still, it was a process which would be made all the more difficult by his head being removed from his shoulders, and this was exactly what the Lieutenant-governor of Lucknow was threatening to do to him if he was late.

"I'll have to risk it," he said.

The General dismounted, flashed Sanjeev a smile, and then held up both hands to try and ward off the volley of words Brandt was directing at him.

"I've got seventeen people waiting to see you in the mess tent, General, and we're getting some very threatening letters from the Ministry of—"

"Later, Brandt."

"—and the Lieutenant-governor has raised the price on your head to two thousand rupees, and we're receiving word that the new-breeds are mobilizing an army in the terai, although perhaps you know more about that than I do—"

"I said later," said the General, glancing meaningfully at Sanjeev.

Sanjeev did his best to look innocent. He had been hearing rumours. He made weapons, after all, although not the sort that could be readily afforded by the new-breeds massing in the terai. They belonged to the prison colonies.

The General smiled at Sanjeev again and led his horse away. He barked out orders as he went, switching from Hindustani to English, depending on who he was talking to. Sanjeev was fluent in both, so he barely noticed the transition.

"Rhea, hot water for a bath. Ahmed, I want the gates closed and the watch on them doubled, just for a few hours. No one goes in or out without permission from me or Brandt. John, take my horse, and be kind to him, understand? Lots of oats, or whatever it is they like. He's had a hard couple of weeks."

Brandt watched the General's retreating back and heaved a sigh. "He's always like this. God knows how we ever get anything done around here. He'll head straight for the Sahiba unless you physically prevent him."

Sanjeev, after two hours spent hanging around, thinking determinedly of his daughters' futures, wasn't going to shy away from the prospect of physically preventing him. He hastened after the General, who started speaking without even turning around. "Always a pleasure to see you, my friend, but I'm a little busy right n—"

"Please Sahib," said Sanjeev, gesturing at the three large crates he'd had brought here—at great expense—from Lucknow. "I have to be in front of the Lieutenant-governor by sunset, either with his guns or with a suitable excuse."

He wasn't sure whether it was the word 'guns' or the word 'Lieutenant-governor' that made the General stop. Certainly, Jack Cade had an undeniable fondness for stealing from the Lieutenant-governor. And there were so many rich Europeans to be robbed in India that his preference for the Lieutenant-governor was starting to seem personal.

The General turned round to face him, a half-reluctant smile spreading across his face. "Guns?"

"Three crates of Snider-Enfield rifles, Sahib. The very best. Ordered by the Lieutenant-governor for his garrison."

Sanjeev led him eagerly to the crates, pressing a crowbar into his hand so that he could lever up the lid. The General still seemed undecided. Sanjeev saw him glance over to the other end of the camp, where a young woman in a white sari was sitting in the shade of a peepal tree, reading a book. She was surrounded by dutiful but bored-looking handmaidens, who were combing out her long dark hair for want of anything better to do.

This was the Sahiba. Some of the locals had taken to calling her Lakshmi, after the goddess of wealth and prosperity, because she rode in the treasury cart, among the piles of gold, when the army was on the move. It was the only place sufficiently well-guarded to protect her.

Since she didn't seem to be in danger of looking up from her book any time soon, the General turned back to Sanjeev, and drummed his fingers on top of the crate with reluctant enthusiasm.

"Snider-Enfields, you say?"

"Yes, Sahib."

"Breech-loading?"

"Of course, Sahib."

"Boxer cartridges?"

"Naturally."

The General finally yielded to temptation and used the crowbar to lever up the lid of the nearest crate. "Don't they have to be made at the factory at Enfield to be Snider-Enfields?"

"Do they?" said Sanjeev innocently. "The Lieutenant-governor didn't seem to mind. Perhaps it's because the nice men at Enfield charge five times what I charge, but who can really fathom the mind of such an exalted being?"

The General fished one of the rifles out of the crate. Sanjeev could tell he was impressed. Perfectly balanced, mahogany-finished, with silver detailing. Light as a feather, straight as an arrow, and deadly as a plague. Perhaps the clever engineers at Enfield had invented the Snider, but Sanjeev had perfected it. Maybe that was why—or partly why—he had taken the guns to Jack Cade, rather than the Lieutenant-governor. He wanted them to be seen by people who could appreciate them.

"Beautiful," said Jack, drawing the rifle up to his shoulder, and checking the line of sight. "I've seen real Sniders that didn't look this good."

"Yes, Sahib," said Sanjeev. He didn't see the point in being humble about it.

"How much do you want for them?"

"For you, Sahib—one hundred a crate. They're worth at least that, as you can see. I met some runaways from the prison colonies on my way here who offered me two hundred a crate."

"Why didn't you take them up on their offer?"

Sanjeev gave him a withering look. "Runaways from the prison colonies, Sahib? I doubt they've got two rupees, let alone two hundred. Besides, the Lieutenant-governor would never believe I was robbed by a gang of half-starved new-breeds. But you, on the other hand..."

Jack laughed and inclined his head slightly. "Oh, yes. Flattery will be taken into account, Sanjeev, don't you worry. How much is the Lieutenant-governor paying?"

Sanjeev dug his hands into his pockets. "Well, he gets a special price, doesn't he? For guarding the city of Lucknow and bestowing his civilizing influence on the savages. But he doesn't pay even that. I'm always having to give him credit, and my children can't live on his credit."

"Nobody could, on his." Jack turned back to the crate, hunted around for the box of cartridges, and started to unpack them. "How are the girls?" he asked, as he worked. Sanjeev had noticed that he always liked to be doing at least two things at once.

"Very well, Sahib, thank you. My eldest is the most beautiful young woman in Lucknow, if you've changed your mind?"

"Thank you, but no," said Jack, busily loading cartridges into the rifle. "Anyway, wouldn't you be worried about having part-demon grandchildren? Some people can get a bit touchy about that kind of thing."

Sanjeev, who'd been annoyed at the swiftness of the 'no', sighed irritably. This was exactly why the British Sahibs would never understand India. They didn't know enough about the way Indian people thought. Sanjeev was hardly a traditionalist. If any of his daughters had offered to burn themselves alive on their husband's funeral pyre, like Sati did, he would have had something to say about it. And he was very proud of his Western education. He liked mechanisms, and knowable principles, and things that made sense. But he also liked respect, and passion, and stories, and felt that there was a subtlety to life which was being entirely missed by his imperial overlords.

"No, Sahib," he said patiently. "The Hindu cosmos has demons—they are called 'asuras'—but they're not morally inferior to the gods. In fact, many of them are more virtuous than the gods. There is a king of the asuras, called Bali, who very much reminds me of you—very generous, very successful in battle. He led the asuras against the gods and became master of the three worlds. He was beloved by all because of his generosity. But that was to prove his undoing."

Jack glanced again at the young woman in the white sari. Whether it was the mention of the word 'undoing', or whether he was impatient to be enjoying her embraces, Sanjeev didn't know.

"The defeated gods approached Vishnu for help," he went on, "and Vishnu came to Bali as a dwarf and asked for three paces of land as an offering. Bali agreed at once. As soon as he had done so, the dwarf became a giant, and covered the land and the sky with two paces. With the third pace, he pushed Bali back down into the Subterranean realms, where all asuras belong."

Jack stared at him blankly. "Is this a good story to be telling someone you're hoping to sell three crates of rifles to?"

Sanjeev shrugged. "Bali could no more be ungenerous than a fish can walk on land. One's undoing is one's undoing, Sahib. It serves no purpose to be warned. At any rate, there is a place for demons in the Hindu cosmos. They're natural forces, just like everything else. They need to be kept in balance, not eradicated."

"This," he added, licking his lips, and ignoring Jack's impatient glance toward the other end of the camp, "is why the British Sahibs are having so much trouble with their prison colonies. They could have built the prisons anywhere else in the world—they own enough of it—and their new-breeds would have stayed docile and broken-spirited. But build them in India, and Indian ideas will filter through. It's inevitable."

Jack had turned his restless eyes back to the rifles. "Yeah," he said, absent-mindedly playing with the trigger mechanism. "Well, I hope to be somewhere very far away when the inevitable happens. And I'd advise you and your girls to do the same."

Suddenly, he swung the rifle into position and fired a shot. The sound was echoing through the camp before Sanjeev had even had time to process what had happened. If he'd been the one in the way of the bullet, he would have been the last to know. But the gun was pointing towards the other end of the camp, where the Sahiba had been sitting. Birds took off from the branches of the peepal tree—handmaidens scattered, shrieking, in all directions—and a man who had been running toward the Sahiba dropped to the ground, bringing up clouds of dust, which gradually settled as the echoes of the shot died down.

In the shade of the peepal tree, the Sahiba continued to read peacefully. She hadn't even looked up from her book.

Jack shouldered the rifle with another swift motion and turned to Brandt. "Would you mind taking that one to the hospital tent and explaining about the Sahiba? I think he's new."

Brandt started to hurry away, but Jack, whose eyes had turned automatically back to the sleek, mahogany-finished barrel of the rifle, called after him. "And tell them to stop running, will you? It makes it very difficult for me to avoid major arteries."

He turned back to Sanjeev, as if there had been no interruption, and gave him the usual Jack Cade grin. "These are wonderful, my friend. I want them. Tell Brandt I said you could have four hundred."

"Thank you," said Sanjeev, his eyes still on the distant figure on the ground. It had been a very good shot. Clean through the shoulder from at least a hundred yards.

"And, with the extra hundred," Jack went on, "if you wanted to pack up your workshop and head east—maybe marry your daughters to some nice, rich Hindus in Benares or Calcutta—I would heartily endorse the idea."

Sanjeev hesitated. "You are planning something, Sahib?"

"It's not me," said Jack, with a small, sad sigh, as though he wished it was. He patted Sanjeev on the shoulder, a little distractedly. The Sahiba had risen from her place under the peepal tree, and was walking back to her tent, with the book held open in front of her eyes.

"I hope we'll see each other again someday, my friend," said Jack, taking his eyes off the Sahiba for just long enough to flash him a disarming smile. "I have to..."

But he didn't finish the sentence—or, if he did, Sanjeev didn't hear it, because the General was already heading towards the Sahiba's tent, his hand still held out at shoulder-height, as though he didn't realize Sanjeev's shoulder was no longer under it.